Learning Agents signs Memorandum of Understanding for Open Badge Factory in Canada

August 29, 2014

Learning Agents has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Discendum Oy, the developer of Open Badge Factory to market, distribute and support the digital credentialing service in Canada.

Open Badges is an open standard developed by the Mozilla Foundation to recognize, validate and demonstrate learning that happens anywhere. Open Badges are digital credentials, created and issued by organizations such as educational institutions, vocational organizations, companies and employers for their students, members, staff, clients or partners.

Discendum is a software development company and e-learning service provider based in Finland. It is a TotaraLMS Partner and a Mahara Partner. It also serves educational services nationwide with Kyvyt.fi an eportfolio service based on Mahara, and also Optima, a learning management system they developed.

Open Badge Factory is an Open Badge management system that provides a centralized and simplified quality platform for Open Badges. Discendum has been developing OBF with funding from the Finnish government, with the funder’s expectation that the service will be marketed beyond the borders of Finland.

Learning Agents is an educational technology solution provider located in Canada and an international advocate for ePortfolios and Open Badges. LAI hosts savvyfolio.net in Canada, a multi-institution ePortfolio service using the Mahara platform, which can display Open Badges. Mahara can also be configured to issue Open Badges through OBF using an Application Programming Interface (API) already developed by Discendum. Learning Agents contributed to Discendum’s successful funding request with a letter of support and has acted as an advisor for the software development project. Learning Agents has also contributed to the international badging community as an active member of the Badge Alliance working groups for Workforce, Higher Education and Endorsement.

The pilot version (1.0) of the service was released on January 15, 2014. A commercial version of the service will be launched in Finland in January 2015.

Soon after, Learning Agents and Discendum will launch a Canadian version of the service from Canadian servers.